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Hello!
Are you just afraid of poor sleep? Afraid that it will get worse and you lose whatever little sleep you now have?Then maybe this is what this is all about. Just a four letter word called FEAR. It is enough to keep people up for nights and they can go on suffering like this for decades because they try so hard to escape from it. But the fact is poor sleep is normal for everyone once in a while! Modify your response to stop avoiding it anymore and start kinda expecting it to happen every night like welcoming an old friend, the fact is that sleep is never controlled by anyone or anything, your body just makes it happen all by itself. Therefore worrying about it is completely futile and unnecessary.
Just keeping to a regular bedtime schedule is all you need and your body will take care of everything else. Just trust your own body for once! Stop trying so hard and doing so many things just to sleep! Let it happen all by itself. Your mindset and attitude, particularly towards bad nights will be key to your recovery. Good night and I wish you achieve your goals soon.
Hello Kay
You can try driving short distances first then slowly ramp up as you get more comfortable. That’s how I did it. For me, the fear of getting into a horrible accident and dying was enough to keep me awake during the whole drive. I guess it’s the same fear of not sleeping that kept me awake also! But like many things in life, you can’t move on unless you are willing to move out of your comfort zone, it’s the same principle when it comes to sleep, you won’t improve unless you are willing to experience the unpleasantness of poor sleep until you no longer fear it. Nobody is saying you can’t do this at your own pace. Good luck and be brave!Sleep is just sleep, there’s no way your body can do it wrong. If you reach a place like me, I don’t particularly celebratory if I get more than 8 hours, neither do I get upset if I got 4 or 5 either! But most of the times it’s in between. I stopped connecting actions/thoughts to sleep, because I became convinced there’s none even if you believe taking ambien helps but it’s always your own body that made you sleep and nothing else. I also stopped chasing sleep and fearing poor sleep, that’s how I recover and still doing great today. Good night and happy sleeping to you!
Hi Dalton!
Stimulus control of getting out of bed is supposed to make you be more welcoming to wakefulness and not struggle with it. Therefore, it doesn’t matter where you go, out of bed or not, as long as you stop seeing waking up as stressful, and try to be friends with wakefulness because waking up during the night is very normal and happens to everyone.Try not to do too many things to sleep, because this only reinforces there is something horribly wrong and you need to deal with it urgently, but unfortunately, nobody can do anything about sleep. Your body determines when and how much sleep you get so trying to force yourself to sleep is not going to work but leaves you more frustrated which makes your insomnia worse. Build your good working relationship with poor sleep, ask yourself why you fear it so much and if that fear is real. Most people still function very well on little sleep. Once you are okay with getting some poor sleep plus stop trying to avoid or fix it, and keeping to a regular bedtime, you will do very well. Be patient and stop trying to rush things, your body will recover at its own pace, the ultimate aim is to be at peace within yourself. Good luck!
Hello!
If you do a sleep diary, you only estimate how much you sleep without clock watching. But from my experience, your best sleep happens when you no longer track it or try to make improvements. Everyone’s sleep will right itself, as long as you stick to a regular bedtime schedule, where you just go to bed X and get out at Y, and you don’t care what happens in between. Your body should respond nicely within a few weeks. You might get some nights where your sleep gets worse but that’s okay because this is a sure sign everything is working well as your sleep drive will decrease naturally after good nights. Good luck!Sounds normal so far, what’s wrong? If you slept too well for a few nights, it’s natural your sleep drive is reduced so your sleep wouldn’t be as good, just common sense, isn’t it? It’s like your appetite for food becomes less or disappears after eating a full meal or overeating. If otherwise, you keep on feeling sleepy or hungry all the time even after eating and sleeping well, then something is really wrong with you. You could have some sort of underlying disease and you need to rush to see a doctor!
Hello!
How many weeks are you into cbti? What I can say is be as patient as you can and try sticking to the plan as much as possible. Since you are a client, you should direct your queries to Martin and I’m sure he will answer them satisfactorily.Another thing is please try not to be so hard on yourself. It’s okay if you can’t follow the cbti rules exactly every day, you are only human and doing the best you can. Be kind on yourself and practise self compassion. As a former client of Martin myself, and graduated exactly one year ago, I am happy to say I am completely relaxed about my sleep and don’t follow any rules anymore except having a reasonably regular bedtime. Other things like stimulus control of getting out of bed if unable to sleep, or not napping during the day, I’ve completely ditched all that because I sleep whenever I have the chance (with my body cooperating, of course) and the time for it. I stopped protecting my nocturnal sleep and I do sometimes have difficulty falling asleep at night due the afternoon naps I’m taking, and this is perfectly okay. Nobody is judging my sleep except myself. Even that, I have been very open-minded about my own sleep. I sleep great now because I let my body take care of it and I feel I don’t need to do anything at all. That really takes the pressure off and I can fall asleep quite easily. I am never bothered with the occasional bad night. Recovery doesn’t necessarily mean sleeping well, it just means you are no longer stressed or terrified with the idea of getting poor sleep, so shifting your mindset is key. Good luck to you and I hope you can have a great outcome as well.
Hello!
Be willing to experience wakefulness, even welcoming it
when it happens because this is normal. Try not to track or monitor your sleep especially trying to figure out when you are going to fall asleep, just rest in bed and let that happen naturally. The idea behind this is to be okay with wakefulness anytime and anywhere and to minimise the troubleshooting, pondering, wondering that’s going on inside your head, if you do these steps diligently, you will do very well. Best of luck!Hello guys
Fear is driving all this. Fear of something. And these can be real or fake, your brain is confused between the two and is in constant hyperalert state over it. In many cases, certainly in insomnia, that fear is completely false and unwarranted. Everyone knows how to sleep just like they know how to eat or breathe. So why bother worrying over something that takes care of itself? Now, there can be two ways to tackle this, either through a cocktail of drugs that alter brain chemistry or through repeated exposure to that very thing that causes you so much fear until you just get used to it, this is sometimes called the Claire Weekes’ method. Apparently, your brain is capable of rewiring itself neurally. Tackle the fear head-on and be brave about it! What is it so bad that inspires so much fear and resentment about it? Is this fear even rational? Get to the root of your fears and be willing to see if they are really true. This route will often lead to long lasting success without drugs. Good luck guys!Oh no, try not to stop the panic. It never works and just comes back stronger! Allow it to come and it will pass. Welcome all thoughts no matter how unpleasant they seem. Thoughts are just thoughts, they can’t harm you and they aren’t always true. But they are almost always false! Read up Claire Weekes’ method of dealing with anxiety and general unpleasantness. Basically, she said allow the unpleasant feelings to overwhelm you until they don’t matter anymore. In time, they just become less important and you get desensitized to them. Don’t shut them out or avoid them in any way but you can do other things to distract yourself but try not to escape them actively, because they will keep coming back and bother you more! Your brain has got confused between real threats such as escaping a tiger or a burning building to something completely harmless like not getting enough sleep or getting poor sleep, you need to show your brain these threats aren’t real and that everything is a false alarm because it is! But in general, you are trying to protect your sleep which doesn’t need protecting at all because your body is extremely good at it, it’s what you’re born to do! Good luck!
Hi Edgar
Yes I do feel sorry for you. But I don’t think feeling sorry or you endlessly ranting about it is going to help you much. Your life still goes on despite the lack of sleep and so does everyone else’s. Perhaps you should think about what is it really that frightens you so much about sleeping poorly. Must you have a perfect sleep every night? Nobody gets that, not even the best sleepers! So how many times have you gone through this when you slogged on with your day despite sleeping poorly the night before? Considering your long history, it must be a hell lot of times! But to still not let it go by now is pretty astonishing to me, it’s super human!I would take any nap if I have the opportunity and time for it. What’s wrong with that? I stopped trying to protect my nocturnal sleep, I couldn’t care less if I can’t sleep the whole night due to a damn nap. Recovering isn’t so much about getting that perfect that 6-8 hours of sleep every single night, it is really about not being afraid anymore. Terrified of taking naps or whatever it is you are making a connection to your sleep. You really need to work on your relationship with poor sleep to get ahead! Stop focusing on the sleep part, this is really something else, it’s about being in that state of terror for god knows how long over something completely harmless and normal, which is the occasional bad night that everyone gets. Stop catastrophizing and start living your life! And besides none of this is new, we’ve all heard about your insomniac stories and your alcoholism for god knows how long already.
What time do you get up to start your day? And what was your normal bedtime before you lost your pet? Was it much earlier than 10pm? Don’t make up lost sleep by going to bed earlier! You can go to sleep later but not earlier. The reason behind this is because you need to build up a healthy sleep drive, and this works by amount of continuous time spent awake not what the clock is saying. The healthy amount of wakefulness for a healthy sleep drive is between 16-18 hours, work out yours and then figure out what time you should be in bed. Be prepared to experiment with this because everyone is different but start with 18 hours and slowly decrease that to 17 or 16 depending on your need, you should do fine! Stop overthinking and overdoing it, sleep is quite easy once you understand it well enough. It’s not this black box that’s mysterious and hard to understand, sleep is just sleep, your body is born to do it without much effort, just like eating and breathing.
Great insight! Thanks for sharing. Learning to develop a good working relationship with poor sleep is key to recovery.
Greetings!
Entertain those very thoughts that are keeping your awake. So your baby will be up in a few hours, and you’ll be knackered from lack of sleep but so what?? Endeavour to find out if it’s really that bad. Everyone knows parenting isn’t easy so allow yourself to feel pressured and stressed. It’s normal! Nobody is judging you or saying this shouldn’t be happening. Because human brains work like this: Brain: There’s a danger here, you need to take care of it. You: Oh no, I need to get away from this. It’s horrible. I’m gonna shut all these horrible thoughts out because they’re unpleasant. Brain: You try to make me go away??! Nice try! Here’s more.. good luck with that! Then before you know it, you’ve got terrible sleep and find it harder to shut down to rest. Don’t shut things out from your brain or try to make them go away, it doesn’t work. Accept them with grace and courage, and you might succeed beyond your wildest dreams. Look beyond the insomnia and learn the lessons that this episode in life provides: patience, perseverance and courage. Good luck and congratulations on being a parent!
